If you were a fictional blonde woman in the Noughties who was chased, abducted, shot at or maimed, you were probably played by Maggie Grace. Between the blockbuster puzzle box series Lost, where she played rich-girl-with-regrets Shannon Rutherford, and Taken, in which she was Liam Neeson’s eternally kidnapped daughter, Grace cornered the market in damsels in new-millennium distress. For a bookworm and self-described Jane Austen nerd who grew up on tales of multifaceted women deft at shaking loose the shackles of the patriarchy, this was... tricky.
“I don’t know if I had an essence of fragility to me,” the 40-year-old says today, slowly, softly and, dare I say it, with a slight fragility to her. “But that was just what was available [back then], and how we saw young women. I mostly played rape victims for a living for at least the first half of my career.” She winces a bit. “So it’s really heartening to see a lot of younger female parts now having more agency, and moving the story forward.”
